John Stewart, Mother Teresa and the Power of Song in the Field Where the Angels Dance

He died ten years ago at the age of 68. He didn’t achieve fame at the level of some who admired him, among them James Taylor, Carole King, Lindsey Buckingham, Nanci Griffith and Roseanne Cash.

Nevertheless, he remains a highly-acclaimed hero of Americana music, one of the original singer/songwriters to blend folk music with rock. He wrote consistently over five decades, leaving a rich body of work including over 50 albums. His music has a way of opening the mysterious pathways of the human heart. It inspires a tenacious zest for life.

John Stewart (1939-2008) elevated “all forgotten people, never heard and never seen” with his artistic gift.

It’s a beautiful thing to contemplate an artist’s entire body of work after his passing, and I was reminded of that when I attended a tribute concert honoring Stewart a few weeks ago at Stargazers Theater in Colorado Springs.

We fail artists when, by neccessity, we reduce a career to a few sentences. Fans of Stewart’s work feel the privilege of familiarity with unrecognized gems of human truth and artistic mastery blending poetic genius with fleet-fingered guitar.

After we’d been married for a couple of decades, Rick and I got to meet Stewart at a weekend show in Chama, New Mexico. When it was my turn to shake his hand, I quickly related the story of how his music made me take a second look at the man I married.

The singer looked over at my husband with a wry smile and said, “Don’t you believe it.”

Each album contained gems that renewed my optimism and stretched my soul. Stewart always left me a little more human; vulnerable to the pain of others, asking essential questions in the face of the temptation to cynicism, as he had done in a song written after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, for whom he campaigned in 1968.

“Shoot all the brave horses, and how will we ride?”

As a serious believer, I’m also looking for a writer to reveal his heart, to let us in on what matters most to him, what he believes about things beyond the material world. John Stewart did not disappoint.

Oh, faith it is a fire,
And it’s fanned by the winds of thanks,
I am worried of our numbers,
And I’m worried of our ranks,
As we fire up the Porsches,
Fighting to survive,
And we look for valet parking
Out on Rodeo Drive….
And it makes it hard,
I wonder if God cries
When he sees the pictures
Taken at Botswanna,
The pictures of the children
With the flies in their eyes.
Ohhh, credo domino.

Credo domino. Lord, I believe.

Stewart attended Catholic school as a youth and I began noticing an increase in Catholic themes in his later work, though he never struck me as a practicer of the faith. However ambivalent he may have been toward the Church, John Stewart always seemed sincere, searching, perhaps looking for the most universal strain of hope he could find.

There are the references to crossing the heart and the sign of the cross (“Reasons to Rise,”“Runaway Train”). There’s “The Eyes of Sweet Virginia,” which one day suddenly struck me as having Marian overtones. “The eyes of sweet Virginia were headlights on the road, a beacon for the weary heart that hardens as it goes…In the eyes of sweet Viriginia was something I had lost.” These sad words are followed of course by the inevitable Stewart optimism:

Hang on dreams, you ain’t seen it all.
And I don’t want much, I just want it all,
And I will search forever here among the stones
Oh to find a girl who looks like home.

“I was teaching a songwriting course. I was asked to bring the paintings of Mother Teresa I was doing to display in the dining hall. After being up for a day, the executives asked me to take them down as ‘…they didn’t want people thinking that’s what Omega is about.’ I always thought of Mother Teresa as a great human being like Ghandi, not a symbol of the Catholic Church. Anyway, I was not pleased. I wrote the song in about thirty minutes and sang it there in a show I did with Tuck and Patti.”

“The place went crazy,” he adds, “and they called more attention to the Mother than if they had left them up…the power of songs.”

They were only pictures of the promise
A higher soul who knows no rest
Who serves the poorest of the poor,She is the best of all the best.
…Teresa fell without a whimper
Higher artists make no soundIn the Omega Hills of the New AwarenessThey made me take the Mother down.
They made me take the Mother down.

Mother Teresa is indeed more than a symbol of the Catholic Church but in fairness to her, she did say unequivocally that her strength came from Eucharistic worship and adoration there. “The best of all the best” still shines for those seeking holiness in these dark days of scandal. But in fairness to John Stewart, I know what he meant and I’m proud of how he defended Mother Teresa, eloquently pointing out to those who wanted to distance themselves from the saint:

Hungry people in Calcutta would never take the Mother down.

That’s not all there was to Stewart’s spiritual quest, of course. I hear the fruits of his ventures into Eastern spiritual practices as well, again and again the longing of a heart that can’t believe the only things that are real are those we can measure with our limited scientific instruments.

It tells me there was much more to this man’s thought and heart than “people out there turning music into gold.”

“It’s in the light of the long forgotten burning deep in the Milky Way,” the song opens, evoking the beginning of Creation. “It’s in the night of the prayer wheels turning in the dawning of the day.”

…It’s in the fame of the fire starters,
And the cave where the Crow Man paints…
It’s revealed in the gold of the tombs of Cairo…It’s in the of faith young St. Sebastian,
He never cracked when the arrows flew,It’s in the face on the Shroud of Turin, yeah
And the miracle of Guadalu….

It’s the thread throughout history: glimmers of evidence offering hope that our longings for the Divine and the immortality of the soul may one day be realized.

It’s in the field where the angels danceTo the rhythm of the hearts who are waiting for a chance…

In the field where the angels dance.

John Stewart, I’ve listened for decades to the rhythm of your heart and the power of your song as you worked it out on the strings of your guitar. Rest in peace.

Great songs are still being written. This one took my breath away just after news broke of more scandal than I’d ever dreamed possible in the Church: Kevin Heider reveals his heart in The Body. You have to hear it. And keep the prayers coming.

Share this:

Like this:

Published by Peggy Haslar

I'm a writer and counselor working with children in a high poverty rural community in southern Colorado. A former college English instructor, I blog about civility, culture, contemplation and children at Sparrowfare (peggyhaslar.com).
View all posts by Peggy Haslar

Fare Finder

Reads that Feed

Amazon Affiliate Disclosure

Some Sparrowfare links are affiliate links. Peggy Haslar is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.